Pixar boss explains why Steve Jobs was such a great architect

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Spaceship 2

Designed in collaboration with Steve Jobs by Norman Foster, the new Infinite Loop has Apple fans excited… but not architects. Informally polling a group of 6,000 architects around the world gathered for a South African conference, Fortune’s Philip Elmer DeWitt discovered that, by and large, the professionals he encountered hated Apple’s new Spaceship Campus.

But DeWitt reminds us all that Steve Jobs is no newcomer to architecture. He designed Pixar’s headquarters personally, and it’s a design that has resulted in some of the most creative cinema to come out of Hollywood in the last generation.

According to president Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs’s instincts as an architect should be trusted, because while he wasn’t always right, he was willing to learn from his mistakes.

Pointing out that Jobs originally envisioned Pixar’s headquarters as containing only a single bathroom to “bring people together out of necessity,” Catmull says that Jobs then went in a completely opposite direction:

Next, he envisioned a separate building for each movie under production—the idea being that each crew would benefit from having its own contained space, free of distraction. I wasn’t so sure about that, so I asked him to go on a road trip. Showing, not telling, worked best with Steve, which is why I coaxed him south to Burbank for a tour of the four-story glazed-glass-and-aluminum building on Thornton Avenue known as Northside. Disney Animation had taken it over in 1997, using it to house the crew for its first 3D animated movie, Dinosaur, among other projects…

After an hour or so wandering around the place, I could tell he was getting the message: Creating separate buildings for each film would be isolating. He saw firsthand the way that the Disney people took advantage of the open floor plan, sharing information and brainstorming. Steve was a big believer in the power of accidental mingling; he knew that creativity was not a solitary endeavor. But our trip to Northside helped clarify that thinking. In a creative company, separating your people into distinct silos—Project A over here, Project B over there—can be counterproductive.

After that, Jobs helped design a headquarters for Pixar that was as collaborative as it was fluid. And while Pixar has outgrown its original headquarters, the spirit of that design lives on in Apple’s new Spaceship Campus. Architects might hate it, but isn’t it possible they’re just jealous?

Source: Fortune

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